On Wednesday, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed an antitrust lawsuit against Intel, alleging that the chip maker’s symbiotic liaison with PC maker Dell over the years has been part of Intel’s competition-thwarting practices against its rival AMD. 
 
Pointing out Intel’s munificence towards computer makers, in form of rebates, helped the company illegally retain its domination of the chip market, Cuomo said that the Intel strategy was essentially aimed at preventing AMD from gaining business from the PC makers.

With reference to the longstanding Intel-Dell association, the 83-page lawsuit alleged that Intel, over the last four years, had doled out payments worth billions of dollars to Dell, in an attempt to avert the company from using chips other than its own.

The lawsuit detailed that Intel’s ‘largesse’ towards Dell, at times, even surpassed the quarterly profit reported by the computer maker.

Statistically speaking, the lawsuit states that from February 2002 to January 2007, Dell was paid a whopping $6 billion by Intel. Furthermore, in one particular fiscal quarter, the payments from Intel comprised almost 116 percent of the net income reported by Dell.

The lawsuit said: “In pure dollar terms, Dell was far and away the leader in receiving Intel's largess. Dell understood that the primary purpose of the various 'Intel Funds' was to keep AMD’s central processing units out of Dell computers and servers.”